Greenback Recycling CTO: “Demonizing” plastic won’t solve global pollution crisis

The “demonization” of plastic is a “knee-jerk reaction” to the problem of plastic pollution, says Carlos Ludlow-Palafox, co-founder and chief technology officer at UK-based Greenback Recycling Technologies.

Packaging Insights sits down with Ludlow-Palafox to explore how Greenback’s Enval Modules work to ensure the circularity of plastic. 

He also discusses the steps the company is taking to improve transparency within the recycling industry, stating that due to the growing demand for and scarcity of recycled plastic, some are “buying virgin plastic, making it dirty, and selling it as recycled.”

“Societal awareness about climate change has established plastic as ‘public enemy number one.’ Plastic started losing market share in the eyes of the petrochemical companies and pushed them to do something about it. They need to take care of what they produce,” Ludlow-Palafox tells us. 

However, he adds: “Demonizing plastics is a knee-jerk reaction to the problem. In many instances, this has resulted in ‘solutions’ that are worse from a climate change point of view.”

“I’m not saying that plastic waste should end up in the oceans, but that’s a plastic waste management issue. It is not necessarily a plastics issue.”

He argues that the next logical step for plastic companies is to improve waste management. “Some are doing this and starting to look at pyrolysis oil and chemical recycling, such as pyrolytic technology.”

Enval chemical recycling modules

Greenback’s Enval pyrolytic technology recycles flexible plastic packaging and multilayer laminates.

Ludlow-Palafox discusses Greenback’s Enval pyrolytic technology for flexible plastic packaging and multilayer laminates.Ludlow-Palafox says that the Enval modules his team was using to recycle aluminum from flexible packaging were relatively small, as they were dealing with a niche material. 

Even after Enval began being utilized to process plastic, he says: “We decided that the modules should remain in this relatively small size and continue processing flexible plastic, which is really good as packaging because it’s very light.”

“We decided, instead of making a bigger plant and a bigger processing unit for flexibles that will not exist in huge amounts in any given area, let’s put these small plants all over the place.”

“Enval is a distributed solution for what is effectively a distributed problem, and that is the main difference between the Enval modules and other chemical recycling technologies.”

Transparency in circularity 

Alongside Enval, Greenback offers its eco2Veritas Circularity Platform, which provides material origin transparency services showing proof that “genuine recycling activity has taken place, preventing greenwashing.” 

“Eco2Veritas is is a traceability platform that Greenback developed to try to fix some of the transparency and accountability-related issues in the recycling world,” says Ludlow-Palafox. 

“We have good examples at the moment where people are buying virgin, making it dirty, and selling it as recycled. And that could not be worse.” 

He says that the AI-driven eco2Veritas platform is a “trustless certification system.” 

“In other words, you don’t have to trust anyone that they are doing the right thing because the proof is there, and it doesn’t depend on human intervention. If something doesn’t make sense, there will be red flags.”

“If you have a pellet of bottles weighing one ton, and mechanically recycle them, at the end you should have a bag of pellets of plastic that is one ton.”

“If you have the data from every equipment involved in that process that shows that there’s one ton continuously, then you have certainty.’’

The Enval pyrolytic tech recycles flexible plastic packs and multilayer laminates (Graphic credit: Greenback).

AI-powered transparency

Ludlow-Palafox says that the recycling industry is increasingly taking the necessary steps to try to ensure transparency, such as implementing certifications. 

“However, a lot of these certifications depend on audits, and we believe that there are ways [to ensure transparency] which don’t depend on audits.”

“Eco2Veritas doesn’t depend on a signature and a piece of paper, but on data that comes from image recognition and in part from AI.”

He argues that this process is increasingly relevant “because there’s a lot of money involved, and unfortunately, where there’s a lot of money involved, there might be people that try to cut corners.”

“In the future, this could be applied to the recycling of many materials, not only plastic, including paper, metals, and glass. It could go beyond recycling to provide a certification, approval, and provenance of things without requiring human intervention, and that’s very important.”